[TYPO3-doc] Experiences with ReSTructured Text

[François Suter]

Hi,

> Sounds familliar ?
>
> Have you guessed it ? That's right. I'm talking about TYPO3.

TBH I don't agree at all. I think TYPO3 would extremely unwieldy to 
write as much documentation as we have. Just thinking about the number 
of pages and content elements that this represents makes my head ache. I 
don't think that TYPO3 is an appropriate solution for long documents. I 
love TYPO3 - I wouldn't have become a Core Team member otherwise - but 
I'm also convinced that any tool, however good, should not be pushed to 
do things it's designed to do from the beginning. I don't do e-commerce 
with TYPO3, neither CRM, for example, although I did push TYPO3 into 
some unusual directions in some projects (like powering a hospital's 
intranet, for which it was not an obvious choice).

I think that writing documentation in TYPO3 would be actually quite 
hard, because of it being split over many pages and content elements. 
Although there is a change history, it would not be as good as a diff 
file for tracking changes. Cross-linking would not be easy either IMO, 
because it would imply that all manuals must be in the same install. 
Outputting to different formats has never struck me as easy either. And 
we would have zero semantical information, which is one of the big gains 
we can have with either DocBook or ReST (albeit a bit less with ReST).

Lastly I would like to remind everyone that we are trying to find a 
common ground with FLOW3/TYPO3 Phoenix for managing documentation and 
opting for TYPO3 v4 would hardly seem reasonable in that regard.

Cheers

-- 

Francois Suter
Cobweb Development Sarl - http://www.cobweb.ch